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The UVA East Asia Center will be hosting Toshi Yoshihara, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, for a discussion of "Chinese Sea Power."

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Toshi Yoshihara is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA). He was previously the inaugural John A. van Beuren Chair of Asia-Pacific Studies and a Professor of Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College.

Dr. Yoshihara’s latest book is Mao’s Army Goes to Sea: Island Campaigns and the Founding of China’s Navy (Georgetown University Press, 2022). A Japanese translation of Mao’s Army Goes to Sea was published by Fusosha in 2023. He co-authored, with James R. Holmes, the second edition of Red Star over the Pacific: China's Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy (Naval Institute Press, 2018). The book has been listed on the Chief of Naval Operations Professional Reading Program, the Indo-Pacific Command Professional Development Reading List, and the Commandant of the Marine Corps Professional Reading Program. The first edition of Red Star over the Pacific (Naval Institute Press, 2010) was translated in Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Germany.

His CSBA publications include Chinese Lessons from the Pacific War: Implications for PLA Warfighting (2023); Rings of Fire: A Conventional Missile Strategy for a Post-INF Treaty World (2022); Seizing on Weakness: Allied Strategy for Competing with China’s Globalizing Military (2021); and Dragon Against the Sun: Chinese Views of Japanese Seapower (2020). Dragon Against the Sun was subsequently translated by Admiral Tomohisa Takei, JMSDF (ret.), the former Chief of the Maritime Staff, and published by a major Japanese press in September 2020.

Dr. Yoshihara is the recipient of the 8th annual Kokkiken Japan Study Award by the Japan Institute for National Fundamentals in July 2021 for his CSBA study, Dragon Against the Sun. In 2016 he was awarded the Navy Meritorious Civilian Service Award in recognition of his scholarship on maritime and strategic affairs at the Naval War College.

Dr. Yoshihara served as a visiting professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University; the School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California, San Diego; and the Strategy Department of the U.S. Air War College. He currently teaches a graduate course on seapower in the Indo-Pacific at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University.

He holds a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, an M.A. from the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and a B.S.F.S. from the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University.